


Mama's Arms

by peskylilcritter



Category: Supernatural
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-11-07
Updated: 2012-11-07
Packaged: 2017-11-18 04:22:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 457
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/556852
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/peskylilcritter/pseuds/peskylilcritter
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Written while listening to Joshua Kadison's 'Mama's Arms' and with Dean in mind. It still hurts like hell, of course, it always will, because you remember, and you aren't sure if that's better or worse.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Mama's Arms

At four years old, you don’t get it, not really.

When you’ve grown enough to understand, it has already been incorporated into your version of normal.

It still hurts like hell, of course, it always will, because you remember, and you aren’t sure if that’s better or worse.

***

You think of her often, especially during your teenage years, when you’re in the guidance counsellor’s or the principal’s office pretty much every other day, and they can’t seem to come up with better questions.

You tell them you don’t get why they keep harping on about it. It happened a damn log time ago and besides, it’s nobody’s business why you move around so often. You’re lying, for the most part, even to yourself and you know it.

Either way, you think about her a lot.

***

A decade later there’s no one to ask stupid questions you won’t answer. Instead, there’s a missing father and a dead girl and your brother, broken in a painfully familiar way.

It’s downhill from there.

Occasionally the saying ‘to hell in a handbasket' comes to mind and you have to forcefully suppress hysterical laughter. Another few years later this thought is usually followed up with ‘the road to hell is paved with good intentions’.

Sometimes you hear her voice, telling your four-year-old self about evil done in the name of Aslan and good done in the name of Tash, and you wish with everything you are, that someone else could hear those words and take them to heart.

***

These days you no longer have any kind of faith, or hope. You’re just muddling through, just doing the best you can, for no other reason than that you don’t really know how to anything else. You’re like a shark; if you stop moving you’ll just die.

***

Perversely, the more time passes the more you wish you could go back, just spend eternity being four years old and innocent, the proudest pig brother in the world. Eternity in your mom’s kitchen, getting the crusts cut off your PB&J. Eternity in the yard with dad, carefree and laughing and blissfully ignorant. Eternity kissing the baby good-night, forever untouched by demons and angels and everything in-between.

***

There’s a song that you avoid a determination normally reserved for your hometown and your brother’s favourite music. It’s not a song you hear often, what with your collection of cassette tapes, but you try not to listen when it’s on in a diner or a store.

It’s not the song as such that bothers you, even though it’s lightyears away from your kind of music. No, it’s the text. It’s far too easy to find yourself in the words, between the lines.

***

_All you want is Mama’s Arms_

**Author's Note:**

> Sometime in the summer I sat down to write, listening to the music I had on my cell phone. At some point Joshua Kadison's 'Mama's Arms' came round and it struck me how much of Dean could be found in the song. So I put it on repeat and scrawled down a two-page fic in second person within a few minutes. Then I let it sit for a few months because it felt incomplete somehow. It still doesn't feel complete, but now I'm finally ready to post it anyway.


End file.
